Later: And wishing I hadn’t. Very poor food, over-eager service, surrounded by tourists who must be the ones responsible for theis being, apparently, No 7 out of 12000 Rome restaurants.
A space for mostly short form stuff and responses to things I see elsewhere.
Eat This Newsletter today ranges from big stories in India and Europe to little gems about candy floss (aka cotton candy) and asparagus.
Oh, and a titan of industrial food calls for mandatory nutrition labels.
Read it at https://buttondown.com/jeremycherfas/archive/etn-255-gamut/ and while you are there, consider subscribing.
In the latest Eat This Newsletter
- Nutrition experts who feed off big food
- The tomato in India
- Tainted turmeric
- Cloves, with a hitch
- 陈麻婆豆腐: is the story true?
Read it at https://buttondown.com/jeremycherfas/archive/etn-253-conflict/ and please consider subscribing.
Eat This Newsletter points the finger at
* alt-protein energetics: the sums don't add up
* breastfeeding: formula looks "less like brain damage and more like a really bad kindergarten teacher", and
* food allergies and intolerance: the immune system loses its mind.
https://buttondown.com/jeremycherfas/archive/eat-this-newsletter-251-relevant/
I can write Eat This Newsletter while on holiday. Promoting it, however, is another story entirely. BLTN, the latest offers food-borne illness, conspicuous fruit consumption, and plant-based meat ... for pets.
https://buttondown.email/jeremycherfas/archive/etn-245-fruity/
Illuminating talk by Banu Özden about the contribution of minority cultures - Rums, Armenians from Anatolia, and Sephardic Jews - to the food of Istanbul, an amalgamation of so many cuisines, she said, “the name of the city defines the cuisine”.
2024-05-13
1 min read
Latest episode, I talk to Eleanor Barnett's about her book Leftovers, which made me think that wasting food is the default human behaviour. Only shortage can stop us doing it. Her solution is to advocate for a new appreciation of the value of food. Is there time?
Checked into Gasthaus Woracziczky
Superb traditional food. Ham with fresh horseradish. Rostbraten. Beer.
so good I went back the next day. Perfect fried chicken.
Latest Eat This Newsletter includes:
Can you talk about the hummus wars when there is an actual war on?
School food in Nairobi
Global — and Californian — production of calories
Silent Doritos
https://buttondown.email/jeremycherfas/archive/223-enough-to-go-around/
"You could literally take a hungry climate refugee and put them in the middle of a field of food, and they’d still starve to death." Interesting take, with which I fully agree. I wonder how the writer might feel about Chris Smaje's Small Farm Future?
The wholeness of the word: 'Regenesis' as myth, Part II | Chris Smaje
”Plants are energised by zero-carbon, zero-cost sunlight, whereas factory-produced microbial biomass is energised by generated electricity at an energetic cost amounting to at least an order of magnitude more.”
Not going to quibble about that order of magnitude greater than zero. The point is very well made: Proposed ecomodernist solutions to future food supply are not solutions at all.
And it's out, the latest issue of Eat This Newsletter https://buttondown.email/jeremycherfas/archive/linked/
A slew of stories from around the web, each of them connected to at least one of the others because that's the way of the food and agriculture system.
https://buttondown.email/jeremycherfas/archive/linked/
Always feels good to finish tomorrow's Eat This Newsletter a little early. Sign up at https://buttondown.email/jeremycherfas/ if you would like my take on nice rice, Big Food, gin, tomatoes and brassicas.
Finished reading: English Food: A People's History by Diane Purkiss, ISBN: 9780007255566
#Non-fiction
Currently reading: English Food: A People's History by Diane Purkiss, ISBN: 9780007255566
#Non-fiction
Localism, manufactured food and energy futures: thoughts from the Groundswell Festival | Chris Smaje
In other words, there’s no sign of an energy transition out of fossils yet.
Just in case you were feeling optimistic because energy from solar increased by 24% last year ...
Just put the finishing touches to Eat This Newsletter 210, with:
* Ur-pizza
* Chinotto, eh?
* Entomophagy? Again!
* Food System Fixes
Subscribe at https://buttondown.email/jeremycherfas/ now and find it in your inbox tomorrow.
Just put the finishing touches to Eat This Newsletter 208. Fancy a pot luck of food-adjacent links? Sign up at https://buttondown.email/jeremycherfas
Nice to see someone else trying to revive blog carnivals in an IndieWeb context. Sara Jakša's first taster appeals on two levels; it is a blog carnival and it is about food. Count me in.
Indeed. Currently editing my next episode, from @ECLLD recent meeting in Budapest, celebrating how the new EU reg on OHM is allowing farmers and food producers to be more sustainable and nutritious.
Checked into Restaurant
Opposite the hotel, semi basement, and giant music screens. As for the food, we shall see.
What We Owe The Future – A review by Tim Harford
Tim Harford's lukewarm review of William MacAskill's book.
If he is right, how could I justify giving £10 to a food bank today when I could set up a charitable trust, let the money accumulate centuries of compound interest before lavishing the proceeds on future generations? Are we morally obliged to live at subsistence levels to maximise the resources available for investment and research so our great-great-great-great-grandchildren will thrive? Such questions have been discussed and analysed at great depth in the literature on climate change. It is surprising to see them waved away with a few sentences here.
Is it that surprising, really?
Very happy to discover that my episode on Garum, Rome's museum of food and cooking, is peaking this week in Nigeria. What are they hearing that you haven't? eatthispodcast.com/garum-museum/
From regenesis to re-exodus: of George Monbiot, mathematical modernism and the case for agrarian localism
George Monbiot illuminates and infuriates in equal measure, although I suspect, after reading Chris Smaje’s review, that I will not be paying much attention in future. I have not read Regenesis, so will say nothing about it myself. Two quotes from Chris (of many others I could have chosen):
“[A]n alternative, perhaps counterintuitive but more plausible argument [is] that low food prices in fact are a fundamental cause of global poverty.”
“[T]here’s no such thing as ‘an inexorable economic logic’, there are just political games with winners and losers – a point the old George Monbiot once understood.”
Yup.
20/25 on Adactio's Font or Food? quiz. Not too shabby.
A little late with the first Eat This Newsletter of the New Year, but my boss says that's OK.
Read it at https://buttondown.email/jeremycherfas/archive/eat-this-newsletter-172-policy-potato-and/ for thoughts on FOPLs, ag and food policy in the US and the UK, potato bread etc
Chuffed to learn that @scotlandbread won @bbcfoodprog award for Food Innovation. If I were in Scotland, I'd be sourcing from Flour to the People. Instead, I gave a donation to the crowdfunder campaign at https://crowdfunder.co.uk/scotlandthebread
Eat This Newsletter 171 is out, with Canadian chickens, proletarian food systems, sweetness and dark, and a tribute to NI Vavilov. All connected, even if somewhat tenuously. Read it at https://buttondown.email/jeremycherfas/archive/eat-this-newsletter-171-proletarian/
I had a whole extra hour this morning to work on tomorrow's Eat This Newsletter, with small family farms, food and GHGs, Sumerian legends, palm oil parasitism, a cookbook writer's memoirs and a bunch of loose ends. To make sure you get it, subscribe.
Subscribe at https://buttondown.email/jeremycherfas
Huge congratulations to Chris Otter, whose fascinating book Diet for a Large Planet has just won the AHA Bentley Prize in World History. We had a great chat about how the British created global food outsourcing and made it was it is today.
https://www.eatthispodcast.com/large-planet/
Great fun chatting with Amalia Sacchi for @festletteratura about food, agriculture and the climate crisis, although ashamed not to be able to do it in Italian. It will be streamed on 8 September at 14:10 CEST.
In case you thought "organic" meant anything more than another way for industrial food to profit with no regard to any costs other than purely financial, Marion Nestle takes apart Danone's decision to abandon small organic dairies https://www.foodpolitics.com/2021/08/24686/
Scotland, stop selling yourself shortbread!
Excellent, thought-provoking read on the fall and rise of local food traditions.
No favourites from Marion Nestle: Unethical food marketing ad of the week: infant formula, organic no less.
https://www.foodpolitics.com/2021/08/most-egregious-food-ad-of-the-week-infant-formula/
@BBCFoodProg Given that more than 50% of food consumed in the UK is imported (more for fruit and veg), have any of the medical associations said anything public about UK food policy over the next few years? Should medical students be visiting Australia, not Oxfordshire?
@herdyshepherd1 The pain for British farmers is real. However, outsourcing British food production to the rest of the world is nothing new. The deal is a return to the good old days of Empire, just like, er, Brexit.
https://eatthispodcast.com/large-planet
Fun to see @racheleats photo of Bonci Pizza illustrating this article, although that seems to me as far from ordinary pizza al taglio as that is from Mr Go’s pizza vendining machine.
https://www.theguardian.com/food/2021/may/07/dough-to-go-romes-first-pizza-vending-machine-gets-mixe...
@theRSAorg I am so disappointed that beyond lip service in the intro there was absolutely no further mention of trade in global food commodities. Even a brief acknowledgement of Brewster Kneen's pioneering efforts to shine a light on Cargill would have added immeasurably.
USDA says there were about 2,019,000 farms in the US in 2020. But how many were actually farms in the usual sense of the word, growing food for sale as their primary business. I'm sure @rosenblawg said something about this recently, but I can't now find it. Help, please.
Let joy be unconfined: farm share of food dollar up from 14.2 cents in 2018 to 14.3 cents in 2019. Farmers get an even lower share of eating out dollars, and eating out dollars plunged during the pandemic.
https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/chart-gallery/gallery/chart-detail/?chartId=100802
In light of @kitchenbee quoting @bittman ‘You will hear, “The food system is broken”. But the truth is that it works almost perfectly for Big Food.' dont get your hopes up for the UN Food Summit.
https://genevasolutions.news/climate/human-rights-overshadowed-by-big-business-in-un-food-summit-say...
Finally got round to @DanSaladinoUK Food Programme about Charles Campion, and what a treat it was. So well put together, and a great picture of the man himself. He will be missed. Thanks Dan.